News from Abroad

Dear grapelovers,

The last few weeks have been filled with travel abroad to various wine fairs. It is always interesting to meet up with and exchange ideas with my colleagues abroad. It helps me to track changes and trends as well as finding inspiration for new products.

Currently I have the feeling like the militant "no sulfites added" movement is loosing steam. At the same time, there seem to be more and more winemakers that apply minimalist methods in the cellar. The EU recently changed their regulation for wine labeling, whereby now all ingredients need to be listed. One can speculate if this change has been a factor in the conversion between the natural wine "freaks" and the industrial wine producers.

Another observation is that the global overproduction of wine has become even more critical. Some countries have started to intervene as a result of that. The French government has for example implemented a program for pulling out vines on 27'500 hectares. This equates to two times the whole wine production in Switzerland. California is also pulling out vines left and right and in some countries wine is now being distilled into disinfectant. All of this is being promoted with governmental subsidies. The overproduction is largely caused by the rapidly declining wine consumption.

There are more and more alcohol free alternatives being created. People are experimenting with herbs, vegetables and fruits and I found some of the products to be quite interesting. To remove the alcohol from these products one does however need some heavy machinery, which makes it less attractive for me. There is a lot going on in this area and it will be exciting to follow the development.

All the best, Hoss